Draft of a letter I wrote to my father during a stay at a psychiatric hospital around May 2022 about a rediscovered and 'canonized' text

Dad,

First, I would like to thank you for lending me this book and for allowing me to annotate it (I only highlighted some passages). I don't want to upset you by giving you my opinion on the book, but I will be sincere. One can naturally feel the author's compassion for the condition of the Negroes, but one can unfortunately feel his preference for the assimilation of the Negroes in the colonial society. [As] all individual attempts to emancipate themselves from colonial society always result in failure, in death. Finally, the revolt is not formed by the assembly, the group, ███^[1] but by an agitator who immediately appeases it. I do not deny the colonial reality, one feels the experience [of the author]^[2]. But fiction authorizes any story, the only thing that prevents it is the audience – and it is a White audience. It is for them that [the author] writes, not for the future freed slaves. [The title of the book] is not a book by a Black man for Blacks, but a book by a Black man for Whites. And I understand better why this heritage gets its own fresco. And what a mural it is! The nearest road goes in the opposite direction of reading! If you're waiting in traffic, start the book at the end! And the pedestrians? Bring a cap, you might be working under the sun!

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Notes:

[1]: Personally identifiable information has been erased using ███. The length of the redacted part doesn’t reflect the length of the original text, i.e. "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" would appear as "███"

[2]: Likewise, given that the reviewed book has been 'canonized', and that any 'canon' is a body of texts valued by a specific social group, its title as well as the author's name has been replaced using square brackets to mark modification of the original letter.